Kinfay Moroti
Protesters lie in the arrest position in front of the Robert E. Lee Memorial on June 6, 2020 in downtown Fort Myers.
Elected leaders across the country are removing racist displays from public spaces while protesters are tearing down others. In Fort Myers, Florida, a bronze bust of Confederate General Robert E. Lee disappeared without warning on June 1—but not because protesters had toppled the monument. Instead, with the approval of local officials, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), an all-male Confederate enthusiasts group, had successfully lobbied to protect it.
Fort Myers, a city of more than 87,000 along Florida’s southwestern coast, sits in Lee County, which was named after Robert E. Lee in 1887—even though the general had never set foot there.
Today, along with the empty pedestal where the bust once stood near the city’s downtown square, there is a prominent portrait of Lee, dressed in Confederate regalia, hanging in the Old Lee County Courthouse. Local anti-racist activists have long advocated for both likenesses to be removed from display, before the SCV stepped in.
On June 1, Jeff Hornsby, a moderator for the private Facebook group Keep Lee in Lee that’s affiliated with the SCV, posted a photo of himself draped over the bust. The caption read, “Our honorable General has been under a social media attack this week, so rather than letting someone make that mistake in real life, he is in safe keeping for now with the SCV. We will protect him to the end of the earth. Rebel yell.” The exact location of the statue has not been publicly disclosed.
In response, a group of Gen Z activists is working alongside the Lee County NAACP to move the Confederate displays to a museum to be properly contextualized. Seventeen-year-old Ricky Bocanegra leads the group with the help of five other youth activists. They’re calling the initiative “Keep Robert E. out of Lee.”
The first Keep Robert E. out of Lee protest was held on June 6. Nearly 200 supporters attended and adorned the empty pedestal with signs supporting Black Lives Matter and condemning police brutality. Since then, the group has organized multiple protests, created a petition which has garnered over 2,000 signatures, and crafted a letter template to be sent to local officials.
Henry Crater, an eighteen-year-old organizer for Keep Robert E. out of Lee, sent one of these letters to Lee County Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass, who replied in an email: “We are making Lee County Great Again! Here to make history, not change history!”
Facing an antagonistic local government, on June 15, protesters marched through downtown Fort Myers once again, chanting the names of Black men and women who had been murdered by police officers.
The march concluded at the Fort Myers’s City Hall, where more than a dozen community members spoke at the City Council meeting to request that officials not allow the bust to be reinstalled.
Keri Hendry Weeg, a descendant of one of Fort Myers’s founding families, said that the city should move the bust to a museum and install a freedom fountain in its place.
“Some people don’t understand the unfortunate trauma or the emotional distress that it brings to some people regarding that period of time,” said Stephanie House, another speaker and a member of the Lee County NAACP, “or the name that is congruent with that statue.”
Following the City Council meeting, a council member instructed the Fort Myers City Attorney to “get an answer as it relates to that.” But Cindy Banyai, an international studies professor at Florida Gulf Coast University and a Democratic congressional candidate, says in an interview that asking for a legal opinion on the statue’s removal is a “cop out.”
“Why was there such a swift reaction from the city to take the statue down when it was called for by a small group of Confederate supporters, but when faced with overwhelming opposition to its return are they dragging their feet?” Banyai says.
Kinfay Moroti
Cypress Lake High School student Ricardo Bocanegra leads a protest at the Robert E. Lee Memorial on June 6, 2020 in downtown Fort Myers. Bocanegra and fellow students organized the protest to get signatures for a petition to have the memorial permanently removed.
Despite widespread public outcry in Fort Myers—and an ancestor of Robert E. Lee urging officials to remove monuments to Lee across the United States—most city council members are against removing the bust for good. Mayoral candidate and Fort Myers Councilmember Kevin Anderson told The News-Press, the largest newspaper in Fort Myers, that getting rid of the statue was a form of censorship, and that the Civil War “wasn’t about slavery.”
Anderson isn’t alone in believing that the Civil War was fought for reasons other than slavery. While historians largely agree that slavery caused the Civil War, the “Lost Cause” narrative that insists the Confederates seceded to protect “states’ rights” from Union tyranny is still a widely-held myth, especially in the South.
“There’s a difference between education and glorification,” Bocanegra says, explaining why he disagrees with Anderson’s view.
Fifteen-year-old Annabel Crater, Henry Crater’s younger sister and another organizer with Keep Robert E. out of Lee, knew she wanted to do something after seeing the video of George Floyd’s murder, on May 25, by a white Minneapolis police officer.
“I realized I needed to educate myself on white privilege, especially being a white person in a very white family,” she says. “When Ricky [Bocanegra] posted about organizing a protest on his Snapchat, I was like ‘sign me up, please.’”
Ted Thornhill, a sociologist at Florida Gulf Coast University who specializes in race and racism, told The Progressive that Confederate monuments should have been eliminated a long time ago.
“‘Heritage not hate’ is utter nonsense,” Thornhill says. “I’m from the South, and there’s a lot of Black folks from the South, and that’s not our heritage.”
“It’s disingenuous for government leaders to claim that they are concerned with racial equity and that they want to see Lee County move forward,” he adds. “Those statements ring hollow when these folks have been in a position to make immediate, durable, and meaningful changes, but have consistently chosen not to do so.”
The bust of Robert E. Lee was unveiled in Fort Myers in 1966 at the behest of a now defunct chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. At that time, near the peak of the Civil Rights Movement, the city was embroiled in desegregation litigation. The monument was, as Banyai put it, erected “specifically to intimidate the Black community.”
In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Center published a comprehensive study of Confederate statues and monuments. According to the report, most of these memorials went up in waves: first in the early twentieth century, and then in the 1950s and 1960s; uncoincidentally, both were periods marked by racial inequality and extreme violence against Black people, highlighting how Confederate imagery has historically been evoked as a tool to further white supremacy.
For Bocanegra, blocking the return of Lee’s bust to Lee County is just the first step toward dismantling a system built on racism. “We need to start by taking the evident examples of racism out of communities,” he says. “Removing monuments is real, tangible change.”